Needle Fangs
by Persephone Kore
Summary: Ankaa Black Potter had to wait decades for her son James. Before him was another darkhaired boy she taught Tom Riddle of the Dark Arts, and he showed her their price. Written for the 2006 Genficathon Challenge.


_This is a work of fanfiction based on the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. No undue claim nor any material profit is expected or intended._

**Needle Fangs**  
**by PersephoneKore**

For many years, the Slug Club convened with one dainty-shelled snail among its members.

Ankaa Black had always been precisely that out of place in the gatherings. A daughter of the House of Black did not need Horace Slughorn's help to garner influence or allies; all of those that really mattered came to her by right. Some she would inherit; some would seek her out. Seeking was for newcomers -- Malfoys, Lestranges, Zabinis, and so forth. Blacks did not have to seek.

This didn't mean, of course, that Blacks could not make themselves easy to find. Slughorn was interested in both old blood and promising new arrivals; he gathered his finds conveniently in one spot and served up good food and stimulating conversation.

Since he asked nicely, Ankaa Potter returned to Hogwarts in the autumn after her wedding to greet her younger friends and meet Slughorn's latest acquisitions. Nott, who had been a darling first-year only months ago and had blushed when she mentioned anticipating the wedding night, had grown over the summer and asked impertinently whether she'd enjoyed herself and Harald as much as expected. (This time it was Scrimgeour who looked rather scandalized.)

Attention drifted from her more swiftly than she had expected, however, and Ankaa discovered that the room was not centered where it had always been before. Professor Slughorn was the usual focus; now he shared it -- with, of all people, a little first-year boy.

A slender little dark-haired first-year mudblood boy, pretending to be unassuming. Yet he reminded her of one of the carvings in her parents' house, of a shining slender snakeling that reared already deadly out of the shards and scraps of its eggshell, so she put her chin on her hand and smiled at him.

He looked surprised for the barest instant. Then he smiled back, and she could see him studying her.

That was her first meeting with Tom Riddle.

When she returned home, she told her husband about the little Muggle-born boy with presence and promise.

He approved. The Potters were Gryffindors through and through; of course Harald would approve of the boy and approve of Ankaa "giving him a chance."

Ankaa had nothing against Gryffindors -- ambition required some daring, and _someone_ had to take the chances, and after all old Salazar had found something worth knowing in Godric for longer than they'd hated each other -- but she rolled her eyes at the idea that it was particularly worthy to give the child a helping hand simply because he was orphaned and unfamiliar with the wizarding world.

He had potential.

It was _practical_.

She hadn't planned on it, but she went back, month after month and year, as often as it suited Slughorn to invite guests. Riddle shed his skins as he grew. Where he had been unassuming, he became confident; he no longer pretended to be surprised when people paid him attention. From eager to please he became certain of it, and from certain to please he came to expect to _be_ pleased.

And he learned. He asked questions and learned more from the answer than he was told.

He learned his blood was only besmirched, not all dirt. Ankaa was, he said, the first to hear when he learned that one side of his family had been Salazar's line. Fire lit his eyes when he whispered it to her.

The snakeling's mouth opened and showed needle fangs.

Albus Dumbledore was stern against the Dark Arts, and Slughorn and Dippet were weak -- afraid of the power themselves, and afraid of his objections. Riddle was not.

Ankaa was six years out of school, six years married, and growing annoyed that she had no children yet when her snakeling sent her an owl from Hogwarts.

_Forgive me if I presume,_ he wrote. _I know you have resources -- knowledge -- beyond what I can find in Hogwarts' library. For all it holds my heritage, it has the edges and spurs filed off... a blunted sword, a worn tooth. I want my future, Ankaa. I want to know what Hogwarts will not teach me..._

He waxed poetic over several more inches of parchment, but the gist was that simple: he wanted to know what Hogwarts would not teach him. And, though he refused to say it outright, he was frustrated.

Ankaa met him once on the students' Hogsmeade weekend and found out what he wanted; the next Hogsmeade weekend was nearly canceled due to the threat of Grindelwald's war, but a word here and there restored sense. Grindelwald had no interest in schoolchildren and was currently entangled with the Muggles' foolish struggles anyway.

Ankaa brought Riddle a book, bound by the author herself in very fine unmarked pale leather, wrapped in enchanted green silk because the protective spells on it snagged and pulled at her skin, though she was one of the rightful owners.

"Horcruxes, you say?" she asked softly.

His hands moved over the silk wrapping. A long finger slid underneath, and jerked away quickly... then stole in again, more carefully. "The theory interests me." Red gleamed in his eyes, though he was facing away from the fire, and he looked hungry.

Ankaa wondered if he would be asking her for an alibi, next. "Mm-hmm. Try not to kill anyone useful."

The red flashed. "I won't."

"You'd best bring that back to me before the summer. Copy out what you need, if you like -- do you still have that Muggle diary? It's so dull-looking, it would be perfect. I don't want my ancestors' book going to that orphanage of yours."

"It's none of mine." The red hunger was quenched, his expression only sour. "Besides, I'll be of age. I won't have to go back there."

"Even so." He looked so sullen, despite having just _said_ he'd be free of the place, that she suddenly gave in to an old impulse, reached across the table, and tousled his hair.

He jerked away with such force that his chair rocked dangerously back and hopped on two legs, with a bang and a scrape, before he got himself and the furniture under control and returned it to its former position. People turned to stare. His eyes were burning.

His hair gently slithered over itself and fell back into perfect order.

Ankaa blinked and sat back in her own chair, withdrawing her hands and folding them in her lap. He was daggers and heavy coils now, not a hatchling. "I beg your pardon," she said lightly. "It was fondness, but I was wrong to mar your dignity." She offered him her best charming smile, usually reserved for elder and more powerful relatives who liked her. "Forgive me? But don't scowl over being free this summer! You should come visit me and Harald."

The stiff rage thawed, a little, and the red went out of his eyes again. "Perhaps I shall. Thank you."

He returned the book on time. He did not visit.

They were cordial again before she returned to the Slug Club, which was a relief. Dumbledore had gone away to hunt Grindelwald and then vanished entirely. No one knew if he was alive, but he was not at Hogwarts, and Riddle breathed easier without him. He borrowed another book, nearly as obscure as the first but not, this time, on a topic that made even accomplished Dark wizards squeamish.

Ankaa said she doubted the rumors that Grindelwald could influence dragons to strafe his own choice of targets. Riddle laughed.

They met again on a very wet February Hogsmeade weekend. Some students Ankaa didn't recognize hooted at Riddle about having an older woman as his Valentine. She gave this the response it deserved, which was to be entirely ignored. Howls of laughter would have been ill-bred.

"So, 'Lord Voldemort,' what are your plans after Hogwarts?" He must have given them thought by now, though she noticed he had failed to consult her.

He smiled at her and ran a finger over a heavy signet ring. "I'm applying for the Dark Arts position."

Ankaa raised her eyebrows. "Interesting choice. On the one hand, it seems too dull for you; I'd have expected you to begin on something glorious. On the other... you can be very persuasive, but do you really think Headmaster Dippet will hire an eighteen-year-old teacher -- even you?"

He shrugged and aimed a dazzling smile at the barkeeper, though his eyes remained flat and fixed on her. "Well, if he refuses... I have other options."

His other options, despite all anyone tried to do for him, turned out to be a position in Borgin and Burkes. Ankaa sent him a furious letter berating him for being too proud and foolish to turn to the patroness he _knew_ he had in her.

The owl she received in return bore a very small roll of parchment. He had saluted and signed very correctly, but the body read only, _I have my reasons._

She did not see him again for years, before or after he vanished in his turn. When she did, it was an accident. She had been visiting friends in Hogsmeade; she was walking down the street and watching the stars sparkle. What Riddle had been looking at, she couldn't imagine. Ankaa only knew that she had walked into someone considerably taller and heavier; she had just recovered her poise when he made a perfunctory grab at her to "help" and unbalanced her again. She gripped his arm, digging in with her fingertips rather more than necessary, and looked up.

Shadows slid across his face at first, and she recognized him. When he straightened, looking down at her in surprise, his features were lit -- and for a moment she doubted. His eyes were bloodshot. His face looked as if it had been melted, then molded (rather incompetently) and left to dry.

She let go of his arm and stepped back, looking up at him. This was no longer merely the serpent that had grown from her snakeling. "Lord Voldemort," she said softly.

Part of him was missing. The next words out of her mouth were, incautiously, "Whatever have you done to yourself?" -- but she realized the mistake at once and added as if nothing too far out of the ordinary were wrong, "You look as if you haven't been sleeping well."

He answered the question she'd first meant. "I've done it." His smile was not what it had been, and red flickered in his pupils too. "I cannot be killed. And neither is my life preserved in only one place, like the foolish wizards in Muggles' stories."

Ankaa didn't ask what Muggles' stories had to do with Horcruxes. "I am impressed." She was disturbed. Murder did not surprise her much, though she found it vulgar. But from his words, he had maimed himself internally -- more than once! -- and it showed on his face. The Horcruxes had not been theoretical. The division that had once seemed a painful safeguard now looked more like an injury.

"Will you join me, Ankaa?"

"Join you?"

"My... companions... are waiting in the Hog's Head." He laughed softly, high and cool, when she wrinkled her nose. "Ah, too low for you? We needn't stay long."

"I suppose I could join you in a drink."

"Indeed you could. And after?"

Ankaa raised her eyebrows. "In what, then?"

"In making the wizarding world," he said softly, "what it always should have been. Pure."

This was the basilisk.

"I wish I could," Ankaa sighed. She was lying. Her eyes slid past him to the Hog's Head, then up to the stars glittering above his head. A crown. But the price of the Darkest of Dark Arts was too high, and she questioned the less costly ones in that light... and she was a daughter of the House of Black and did not mean to follow. "But I have another duty to my blood."

"Rearing a child?"

"Still hoping to bear one," she admitted. "We haven't given up hope." Yet.

"I'll save a place for him." He was turning away, his interest in her over. She felt a weight lifting from her lungs.

She Apparated directly home.


End file.
